Most plumbers don’t lose money because they bid too low on purpose. They lose it because the bid was built on the hours they expected to be holding a wrench, and the job charged them for a whole day. Learning how to bid a plumbing job properly is mostly learning to count the hours you’re not thinking about.
1. Look at the job before you price it
Five minutes of looking saves an hour of eating it later. On most residential work the questions that change the price are the same ones every time.
- Access. Is it a basement with a stairwell, or a crawlspace you’ll be on your belly in? The same water heater is two different jobs.
- Age of the system. Old galvanized, old shutoffs, old solder joints. Touching one thing will break another.
- Code. What will the inspector require that the existing install does not have? Expansion tank, pan and drain, seismic strapping, combustion air, a proper vent.
- What’s in the way. Finished walls, a water softener plumbed in front of it, a freezer nobody can move.
- The customer. Someone who wants three quotes isn’t the same bid as someone with water on the floor.
2. Build the labor number honestly
Wrench time is the smallest part of most jobs. Count all of it: drive time there and back, unloading, protecting the floor, draining and pulling the old unit, the trip to the supply house you already know you’ll make, cleanup, haul-off, and the fifteen minutes at the door explaining what you did.
Then apply a real hourly rate, which isn’t your wage. It’s your wage plus payroll burden, plus the truck, plus insurance, plus the phone that answers, plus the software, plus the person doing your books, divided by the hours you can actually bill in a year. Most shops find that number is much higher than what they had been charging.
3. Price the material at today’s cost
Not list price. Not what you paid the last time you bought one, if that was eight months ago. Copper and water heaters move, and a bid built on an old invoice is a bid that quietly gives away the difference.
Then add your markup. Markup on material isn’t a trick, it’s payment for stocking, sourcing, warrantying, and driving to get it.
4. Add the things that get forgotten
These are the usual suspects, and they’re usually missing:
- Permit fees and the time spent pulling the permit and meeting the inspector.
- Disposal of the old equipment.
- The code upgrades you already know the inspector will want.
- Callback risk on an old system you’re connecting new work to.
- Warranty time. If you warranty labor for a year, some of those hours are real.
5. Decide what the price includes, in writing
Most disputes are about scope, not money. Write what is excluded on the bid itself: drywall repair, landscaping restoration, anything behind a finished surface, and code upgrades found at inspection. The free plumbing bid template has a section for exactly this.
6. Present it as a choice, not a yes or no
One number invites one comparison: you against the other guy’s number. Three options change the question to which version of the work the customer wants. For replacement work especially, this is the single highest leverage change most shops can make to how they bid. There’s a full write-up in good, better, best plumbing bids.
7. Hand it over before you leave
Speed wins jobs that price alone does not. If the homeowner called three companies and yours is the only written number in their hand when you drive away, you’re usually in front, and you didn’t have to be cheapest to get there.
Stop bidding from memory
Every step above gets faster and more consistent once the prices are decided in advance instead of in a driveway. That’s what a plumbing price book is for, and it’s also what stops two of your techs quoting the same job two different ways.
If you want the whole thing done while you’re still standing in the utility room, BidRise builds the bid from your book while you talk the job through, and the customer signs it on their phone.